We’ve made a decision to stop publishing on Marktd. Despite making changes to focus on the creative/marketing ideas sister site of PSFK.com, we are still unhappy with the quantity and quality of the site.

Marktd started life as a subscription site called IF! which offered ideas to marketers about how to promote their products in a fresh, modern way. It was fairly successful and we got a good number of people pay the $25 subscription - but we felt that the subscription stopped it being read by a large group of people. A few months back we decided to stop the subscription and relaunch the site as Marktd. Since then interest in the site hasn’t really picked up. I would suggest that this is because of a number of reasons:

* We just aren’t that interesting in marketing and advertising. Personally it’s been 7 years since I had a full time job in advertising and the longer time goes on, the less interest I have in the field. Combine that apathy with the fact that only one or two of the regular writing team have ever worked in advertising.

* Many of our readers who work in marketing and advertising don’t seem to be that interested in only reading about marketing and advertising.

* When we do find exceptional marketing ideas that we are interested in, they tend to end up on PSFK.com anyway.

* We launched Marktd because IF! just wasn’t good enough. We’re closing Marktd because the site just didn’t meet our standards.

Maybe one day we’ll think about relaunching it - maybe with a sponsoring partner. From today, the Marktd email newsletter and RSS will change to PSFK content. We’re hoping that the existing Marktd readers will get even better creative ideas content as a result.

The Economist did something interesting in Philadelphia, USA recently. They branded pizza boxes that went out from 20 pizzerias in the city with global statistics of food consumption - like the amount of wheat consumption or cheese imports. Apparently, most of the pizzerias were near universities or colleges, so they had the aim of getting young people interested in the magazine. From Cool Hunting:

While undoubtedly a promotion for the British newsmagazine, the pizza boxes represent a creative, through-provoking method of essentially force-feeding information. Perhaps it’s a subject matter slightly heavier than the average pizza consumer is expecting. Do we need to know that 96.8 percent of American mushroom imports come from Canada? Probably not, but it’s definitely food for thought.

A while back, we wrote a short post about the Engaging Ideas Card Pack and mentioned, “We haven’t gotten our hands on the full set, but it looks like a neat package for a broad range of ideas.” Well, now (thanks to Rob Fox) we’ve gotten our grubs on the entire pack and sifted through the stack of colorful cards.

The first impression is that they look like a deck of large novelty sized playing cards printed on thick stock cardboard. The front side of each card is an image meant to invoke the message or activity presented on the back. For the most part, the full card formatted images are stellar, ranging from iconic art and expressive photography down to some painfully low resolution and pixelated images. However, given the goals of the cards to engage employees through practical exercises, this is a rather minor point.

The 52-card deck (not including two jokers) is meant to stimulate positive discussion through identification of business goals and ideals. The cards are divided into three general categories: Discover, Design and Deliver. In this hierarchy of inspiration the cards build on each other by slowly introducing more complex activities, interspersed with straightforward tips.

The themes that appeared the most were honing the effectiveness of leadership, identifying core values and honing the business environment to suit the challenges ahead. Here are two sample cards that we think embody the entire project:

21. Distributed Leadership

We tend to think that leadership is something that happens at the top. True, but what is perhaps more true is that acts of leadership happen across and throughout business, day in, day out. Identify these acts of leadership, encourage them and communicate them widely. Doing so helps to demonstrate that all people can offer leadership and will also help acts of leadership to flourish. This exercise also begs an answer to a fundamentally important question necessary to achieve higher levels of engagement: what does your business recognize as leadership?

48. Heartstorming
A success factor for any engagement effort is to discover, design and deliver better ways to connect emotionally with people to inspire their commitment and action. To help accomplish this make “heartstorming” rather than just brainstorming, a core aspect of your business’ problem solving and change practices. Demonstrating difference, “heartstorming” will help to uncover and build stronger emotional connections by focusing groups on questions like:

I love it when…

I get a kick out of it when…

My heart beats faster when…

I’m energized when…

It frustrates me when…

I feel undermined when…

I’m intimidated when…

I feel powerless when…

The Engaging Ideas pack is clearly based on solid business research and extensive experience in the corporate environment. Stagnation of ideas is the clear hurdle targeted by the collection and we applaud the stepping-stones proved for those slow to innovate. Overall, the package is a collection of ideas that won’t be revolutionary to those knowledgeable, but gives a beautifully formatted package of ideas to those hoping to give the friendly push to coworkers or employees. Engaging ideas is a careful and successful balance between professional business pursuits and playful corporate connections.

Thanks again to Rob for taking the time and money to ship a sample pack across the pond.

Team PSFK are pleased to announce our second book! At this time of year we’re supposed to produce a trends report for 2009. When we all sat down and chatted about it, we thought such a report would be so gloomy and rather depressing. We didn’t want to write about things like ‘trading down’ or ‘discreet consumption’! We wanted to talk about all the inspirational ideas we read and write about every day, we wanted to spread the positivity, we wanted to encourage you to re-ignite the world. Honestly.

So we created Good Ideas In 2009. The 80 page click-to-print book features nine Good Ideas and manifestations of them. We write about design, mobile, collaboration, digital, social media, the long term and much more. Click through to the Blurb site and you can get a sneak peek.

The books are $50 for the softback and $60 for the beautiful hardback. If you’re considering buying reports for your company or just books for your coffee table, we ask you to consider Good Ideas In 2009. We’re rather proud of it. We hope it inspires you yo make things better.

The Travel 2.0 blog has an interesting post on Pepsi’s social rebranding. The fact that they’ve changed their logo is now common knowledge - Seth Godin recently blogged about it as well - but it hasn’t been done in a vacuum. Pepsi has actively reached out to 25 of the most influential marketing bloggers, sent them a set of Pepsi cans that captured the brand’s history, as well a set of the new cans and an invitation to join their FriendFeed room to post their comments. FriendFeed, for the uninitiated, is a site that captures all your social activity in one place - so if you are on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, for example, every time you make an update to these sites, the information is updated on FriendFeed. By creating a separate room on the web to record user comments about the rebranding, Pepsi has shown that they are actively listening to consumers and not just dishing out changes without any concern for how it has been accepted.

We’ve all made a snide remark or two about those painfully slow “unboxing” videos clogging up the blogsphere. We never really got into them until we saw this recent clip showing the opening of a Samsung Omnia i900. So far, the video has already been seen by nearly 2 million people!

In 1966 the original Batman television series found so much success in the U.S. that it was eventually exported overseas. When the show aired in Japan, the audience was so enamored by the Caped Crusader that the publisher of Shonen King, a popular boys’ magazine at the time, contacted DC Comics to license the rights to the Dynamic Duo. They would go on to create their own original Batman stories interpreted through the lens of Manga. Though the run was short-lived, lasting for only one year, the comics presented an interesting twist on the Batman paradigm, offering entertaining glimpses into the ways culture gets co-opted and consumed abroad. Even with a larger-than-life icon, some nuances inevitably get lost in translation.

Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, a new book by graphic designer Chip Kidd, fellow collector Saul Ferris and photographer Geoff Spear, collects these little read Batman adventures together for the first time, complete with English translations. In addition, the volume contains an exclusive interview with Jiro Kuwata, the pioneering artist and author of the material. Also worth noting is the fact that the hard and softcover editions have been published simultaneously. This is an innovative approach that seeks to capture the widest customer base, while building in exclusivity for true fans by including additional content and other perks inside the hardcover version. Needless to say, a beautiful designed product that adds another chapter to the continuously evolving fascination with the Batman.

The dairy lobby has always been a powerful force in America, but recently they saw their classic ad campaigns overtaken by cartoon characters that children more readily relate to. These new school cultural icons easily sway children in purchasing choices. The proliferation of SpongeBob snacks or Spiderman cereals drove Big Milk to form a modern marketing group known as “Milk Media.” In the venture’s first deal, school milk consumption increased 34% after the implementation of Disney’s Doug into the milk campaign. While milk has enemies, they certainly have fans in the federal government who wish to promote the milk alternative to sugary foods. The New York Times reports in the Consumed section of their Magazine:

The goal of Milk Media, Long insists, is not to advance the interests of pop-culture products; the goal is to leverage their power to promote milk consumption. “You can have Shrek beating the drum for 500 different sugar products or the Transformers saying, ‘Drink milk and roll out,’ ” he says. “I think we’re doing a lot of good.” In other words, he sees Milk Media’s approach as responding to the realities of the kid-culture marketplace.

Over the summer ISO50 linked a gallery of 70 business cards that are in a creative league of their own. The business card is a time tested strategy to market oneself and many of those in the gallery exhibit unique characteristics that fit each business they represent. These include a divorce lawyer with half a card, an asthma centers written on a balloon, a second hand store with the first contact info scratched out and plethora of simply laid out graphic designer cards. The photos were all taken from a Flickr pool where people posted the coolest cards they’ve found, so if you have a particularly innovative business card, throw it in the bunch. Your odds of landing a client may be better than winning a free lunch at your local restaurant.

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